Want to make sure your life turns out the way you want? Want to trade this life for fortune and fame? If you believe post-grunge rock band Nickelback’s 2005 hit single, then ‘you wanna be a Rockstar’! Love or hate the song, are they right, or do you really wanna be a tech entrepreneur?
Some people want a hedonistic life. Some want to be famous. Others just want to be stinking rich. Some want all three. Some want to really make a positive difference to people’s lives.
So are Nickelback right? What is the best way to get all three and maybe even the fourth too – and quickly – say before the age of 35? In fact, let’s not set our sights too low. Let’s aim to be one of the richest people in the world. Let’s think multi-billionaire. Let’s assume too that we have to do it without relying on accidents of birth – no inheritance of billions from Mummy and Daddy’s money to look forward to. Winning the lottery wouldn’t even get you close so, while luck matters, don’t rely on your luck alone either. How you actually gonna do it?
From the queues of people wanting to be on reality TV programmes whether X-factor, the Voice or Love Island most people seem to agree with Nickelback’s solution: the way to early riches is to become famous, whether a Rock Star or maybe a footballer, or a film star, or these days just famous for being famous. It’s people like that that fill the super-rich but young and self-made lists isn’t it. Well isn’t it?
Nice idea, but no.
Some of those people do make a lot of money in a short time. They have to though as for most their career is likely to be very short. They don’t stay famous or in the rich lists for long and are unlikely to make super-rich.
They are all Techno Stars.
There is one very obvious pattern to Forbes’ self-made super-rich list of the top billionaires on the planet. Almost a quarter of the top super rich, at around the time that Nickleback wrote their hit song, made their money in a similar way. They aren’t film stars, rock stars or sports stars. They are all techno stars. They are also all self-made billionaires. That contrasts with the other people in the same league. With one exception, the rest are all there because of family wealth or are old: they took their time to extreme wealth. Contrast that with the Google guys, say, who made the top 30 by their 30s.
Number one – the richest person on Earth with 56 billion dollars – iin 2007 was not surprisingly Bill Gates, who with Paul Allen (Number 19) set up Microsoft. Paul Allen went on to found Dreamworks, a company working on the boundaries of film-making and computer science. They went on to use much of their personal wealth (and time) solving humanitarian problems, focussing on things like health and education. Yes, many rock stars do charity gigs (think Live Aid) occasionally, so if saving the Earth is your aim then becoming a Rock star may be one way to give you some clout to make a difference. It’s nothing compared to what someone as rich as the Microsoft pair have personally achieved though.
Not far behind was Lawrence Ellison, worth 21.5 billion dollars at the time. He made his name by creating the company Oracle that was largely responsible for pushing the database revolution – not just using databases of course but creating the software that allows other people to use databases. As he’s said “Money is just a method of keeping score now.”
There are then the Google pair Sergey Brin and Larry Page sharing position 26. They only had 16 billion dollars each, but, hey, they only founded Google in 1986. They planned to “do no evil” with their riches and also wanted to plough money into charity. What else do you do when you have that kind of silly money?
At positions and 30 and 31 in the 2007 rich list came Michael Dell and Steven Ballmer. Ballmer is ‘just’ another Microsoft man. Dell of course is responsible for Dell computers. He had the ear of a President as he was on the United States President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Want to make a difference? He could.
Have things changed? Well, yes. Forbes now use tech themselves to keep a real-time rich list. Now of the top ten richest people in the world as I write this, 8 are tech entrepreneurs, now with hundreds of billions of worth each. Elon Musk (Tesla, X etc), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Mark Zuckerberg (FaceBook), Larry Page (Google), Sergey Brin (Google), Jensen Huang (Nvidia) and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft – now richer than Bill Gates but he is still filthy rich too) .
In short, programming/computer science/electronic engineering and inheritance are the most likely source of riches for the richest people in the world. Programming is the only way to reach the top without inheriting money (or perhaps being a Russian president’s protege).
The other advantage of the technology route to riches over the Rock Star way of course is you can aim higher still. Don’t wind up dead at 40 from the drug-induced lifestyle of rock stars – why not aim to still be enjoying being filthy rich at 100 too. If you are wise you may make the world a far better place, though you may also gain the power to make it far worse too.
– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
Updated from the archive of 2007
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